ambition,
and money-making.

Shortly before Coke had marked the young and lovely Lady Elizabeth
Hatton for his own, Bacon had not only paid his court to her in
person, but had also persuaded his great friend and patron, Lord
Essex, to use his influence in inducing her to marry him. Essex did so
to the very best of his ability, a kind service for which Bacon
afterwards repaid him after he had fallen--we have seen that his star
was already in its decadence--by making every effort, and successful
effort, to get him convicted of treason, sentenced to death, and
executed.

Which of these limbs of the law was the beautiful heiress to select?
She showed no inclination to marry Francis Bacon, and she was backed
up in this disinclination by her relatives, the Cecils. The head of
that family, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth's Lord High Treasurer, was
particularly proud of his second son, Robert, whom he had succeeded in
advancing by leaps and bounds until he had become Secretary of State;
and Burghley and the rest of his family feared a dangerous rival to
Robert in the brilliant Bacon, who had already attracted the notice,
and was apparently about to receive the patronage, of the Court. If
Bacon should marry the famous beauty and become possessed of her large
fortune, there was no saying, thought the Cecils, but that he might
attain to such an exalted position as to put their own precocious
Robert in the shade.

Bridget had not been in her grave four months when the great Lord
Burghley died. Coke attended his funeral, and a funeral being
obviously a fitting occasion on which to talk about that still more
dreary ceremony, a wedding, Coke took advantage of it to broach the
question of a marriage between himself and Lady Elizabeth Hatton. He
broached it both to her father, the new Lord Burghley, and to her
uncle, the much more talented Robert. Whatever their astonishment may
have been, each of these Cecils promised to offer no opposition to the
match. They probably reflected that the Attorney-General was a man in
a powerful position, and that, with his own great wealth combined with
that of Lady Elizabeth Hatton, he might possibly prove of service to
the Cecil family in the future.

How the match, proposed under such conditions, came about, history
does not inform us, but, within six months of Bridget's funeral, her
widower embalmed her memory by marrying Elizabeth Hatton, a girl
fifteen years her junior.

If any writer posse